Lo and behold, the art of portraiture has now been replaced by an app and a robotic arm. Just put a beret on your mobile and let it sketch you. No need to bother with artists ever again. That, in so many words, seems to be the message of the new tool from Google’s Creative Lab, just unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Will automation make us happier? – live chat

Read more

You get your photo taken on an Android phone and a small robot holding a pen translates the snap into a line drawing. And there you have it: a portrait. Except this machine does not really draw anyone’s “portrait” – because a robot will never be able do any such thing.

Why must we exaggerate the potential of robots? Every time a robot walks across a room without falling over, it’s hailed as a breakthrough. I once had a conversation with a robot at a science fair. It was like talking to an acid casualty in a language neither of us was fluent in – and that’s being generous. There was no sense of consciousness, yet it was a state of the art device, on display at the Royal Society.

Google’s new device is shown off at Mobile World Congress. Video: TheNextWeb

There are many aspects of human intelligence that robots will never replicate, and portraiture is one of them. The machine demonstrated in Barcelona maps human faces. It does not create true portraits with all their nuance and expression. It is really just a hi-tech Spirograph toy, or the 21st-century equivalent of the automata that amused 18th-century monarchs. Fun to behold, but a long way from even starting to mimic artistic abilities.

So what is so special about portraits that robots can’t replicate? To begin with, there is the desire to actually create a portrait. The portrait app is merely doing what it has been programmed to do. What is art? It is surely, in the first place, the will – or the need – to make and experience art. Only humans have this.

Let’s make a robot that can outwit a cat before we dream of machines that make art. As it is, even if you programmed an app to draw like Rembrandt, this would still only be a passive machine obeying human commands – until the day comes when a computer chooses for itself to depict its world and call it “art”.

Tell us something we don't know: why science can't show us much about art

Read more

Of course, programming a computer to portray people in the way Rembrandt did isn’t very likely either. Art is a subjective, imaginative, unpredictable enterprise. Portraiture is particularly emotional – we find the human face fascinating, funny, communicative, poignant. The art of the portrait expresses the vast range of emotional responses we have to one another (and ourselves). It is ultimately an essay on what it is to be human. Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear, Rembrandt’s Aristotle With a Bust of Homer and Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein embody complex, intense, nuanced encounters and rich ideas of art.

Maybe robots can replace bad portrait art. They can squat on the pavement outside the National Gallery, drawing quick pictures of tourists. Their “portraits” will be lifeless and banal. Inside the museum, meanwhile, Rembrandt will gaze out of his self-portrait, as he has done for centuries – human, all too human.